Education in Exile: International Scholarships, Cold War Politics, and Conflicts among SWAPO Members in Tanzania, 1961–1968

Abstract

This article explores education in exile through a discussion of Namibians’ search for scholarships outside their national borders and of the locations where most studied abroad during the 1960s. These sites include Kurasini International Education Centre and Nkumbi International College, secondary schools established by the African-American Institute in Dar es Salaam and Kabwe, respectively, and Kongwa camp, the site in central Tanzania where the South West Africa People’s Organisation’s (SWAPO) first guerrillas embarked on military training and English and mathematics classes. I argue that Kurasini, Nkumbi, and Kongwa were key sites in SWAPO’s 1960s exile landscape. They channelled prior dialogue about education among Namibians and produced conflicts within the liberation movement that reverberated over later decades. These locations also draw attention to a broader political field. The places in which Namibian exiles lived, and the circumstances in which they lived there, shaped what ‘the Cold War’ meant and how its language was mobilised by competing groups within SWAPO. Such a perspective remains unexplored in historical literature, including literature on the Cold War in southern Africa, which highlights how global powers engaged with African nationalist movements without considering the manner in which liberation movement members used such interventions for other ends. This view should be developed through historical work focused on places where exiles lived and on how they became embedded within both transnational and intra-national politics.